Euphorbia trigona care and propagation

hi guys my name is sean i'm a house plant enthusiast from jakarta indonesia in today's video i'm going to be sharing with you the care and propagation of the euphorbia trigona this is actually a succulent from the central or west african regions this is a very very very common succulent it's often used in landscaping for collection and of course they're oftentimes used for grafting as well grafting is a method in which you cut off the top of the plant and then you put a cacti probably a more expensive cacti over it this way the cacti will root into this plant and this plant will provide nutrient for the the grafted plant above this is because the plant can get more nutrients from the euphorbia trigona and if there's root rot happening it's going to happen to this plant instead of the cactus so this serves as a buffer protection for the grafted cacti but also it's an aesthetic i guess people do like that look of a cacti mounted on this personally i don't really like it but to each of his own this is an easy going very very easy going succulent to care for i know i'm a succulent killer just so you know i kill most of my succulents except a handful and this is one of them and it's got really really interesting beautiful architectural spikes on the main stem and they do put out leaves and these leaves do come and go so they i guess they photosynthesize and they help the plant along when the condition is right and then when they're tired the leaves will just yellow up and fall off uh rose by rose i don't have a lot of leaves going on right now it's quite little but it is so beautiful but they do come back now and then and these guys actually when you cut them they will grow two to three vines out of the place where you cut so if you look online for these guys you'll see massive massive parts of them where they just grow upwards like that into a bush and they don't need really really big pots for this i'm assuming that their roots don't take up too much space this leaves outdoor in bright in direct light they do like a tiny bit of direct light and if you look at the euphorbia trigona rubra that's actually a red version of this it's much sexier than this and it's actually on my wish list but i have way too many plants now to care for so i'm not gonna be getting that any time soon but it's a red version of this sometimes it's got a little bit of green left on it but it's got so much more character to it um i do water this every day lightly only because it's living in very very draining cacti succulent potting mix and it's living in terra cotta pot and i've had this plant for about two years now when i got it it was actually a single plant here i made i made the cut and then three of these vines appear and today i'm going to be cutting them up some more so that they can bush out and then we're going to propagate a lot of these vines because of the ease of propagation these guys are actually very very inexpensive which makes them very very good succulent for our beginners but you don't want to have them around pets and children precisely because of these thorns here they can get really really sharp and i've just been putting slow release fertilizer on this and with most succulents here they're actually very prone to mealybugs and scale as well scale you can see that this armored insect that is usually brown that would stick onto the plant sometimes you would mistake them for like a woody part of the stem because these guys they do get woody over time if you have them for many many years the lower part of the plant will just turn you know into a like a tree trunk basically the scale would be the spots of them and you can actually remove them with neem oil or a little bit of soap soapy water just lightly rub them off yeah and mealybugs you would treat them with minimal oil or if you prefer chemical means you can do that but yeah they're quite susceptible to those here in my climate oh and i do want to bring out that there is um this plant is triangular if you look at it from up top which is why it's called the trigona and it's got really really really nice pattern on the center of its trunk i actually really do enjoy having this around and whenever they grow which they're doing now you can see that they're growing upwards the new growth is light green in color it's got flashy beautiful new leaves and it's just going to take over the space very very slowly and elegantly upwards so this is actually quite a stunning plant that is very very inexpensive that is a bit underrated but yeah easy to come by as well all right so let's get started but first of all i want to point out that there's these babies that are sprouting from the sides of this plant so it's actually already starting to branch out on its own without the cut but as we make the cut it will branch out even more and i can control where it will branch out and i actually don't want to cut them in the same level i want to texture uh the the layers of them so i want to cut them at various angles and yeah they're going to give you milky sap which is actually a little bit toxic a little bit irritating this is known as the african milk plant or milk tree if i'm not wrong and this one i'm going to cut a little bit higher i should be wearing gloves but oh well i did not get i did not prepare for this and so i'm going to cut a little bit higher man there's so much sap all over the place ah i didn't get i didn't get some on me so this is good so i'm just gonna let this uh bleed out a little bit and then so this is the parent plan i'm gonna put it away so one final look at it so it's got uh three cuts here and i do want to keep this away from the rain i think this i do want this to dry out in callous i'm sure this is uh this stuff is going to help it along with callousing it actually protects them from being eaten up by other animals now as for these ones these guys all right yeah she looks looks pretty here it's so unreal it's like the weird animal tentacles you know let me give you a closer look looks like weird animal tentacles on my table all right so i've got nine pots over there i don't think i want anything more than that even though i can definitely produce more but yeah i'm not gonna do that this is not an expensive plant so i don't want it to take too much space and remember which side up it is you don't want to plant it the wrong way down so the easiest way for me i guess i'm just gonna put a little bit of activated charcoal on the table here i'm gonna dab carefully i'm just gonna dab it on here this is to sterilize the wound a bit some people actually wait uh for this to callous over the next few days i don't have that kind of patience so i'm gonna just i'm to stick this directly into the soil and this is my general purpose potting mix by the way it's made with cocoa peat pearlite burnt rice hull and a bit of worm casting i normally would give this my cactus succulent potting mix but they don't ship very well so this is fine i just wanna water this a lot less often and because it is still a fresh wound i'm not gonna water this for the next two days so i'm technically allowing this plant to callous but in the soil i don't know if that makes sense i'm not getting the soil moist at all and my potting mixture is pretty much sterile with the exception of a bit of worm casting which is organic material but this should not rot i'm guessing it should and i'm gonna keep this in indoors away from the rain bright in direct light and almost never water it so yeah the more roots that it has once it's established the more i can water it next third third day from this propagation i'm gonna water this deeply i'm going to leave it alone i'm going to let it dry out between watering let it get good light and let it root i actually don't know how long this will take so this will be an interesting project to see how long they actually take to root and for these guys because they're the bottom or mid section cutting they're going to put out three vines on the top this is just how they do i'm going to finish up with the rest of them and i'm not going to waste your time so i'll show you the family portrait after i'm done all right so i actually ended up with 10 pots because there's just one extra and this purple stuff is actually carbo for run or branded under foradan it's highly toxic i'm not proud of using it but it helps keep the pests at bay and it releases over a long period of time and the pallets uh yellow pallas you see our slow release fertilizer this is balanced npk so it's um yeah it's pretty good for cacti you don't want too much of a nitrogen on these guys because they don't have a lot of leaves look at that it's such a cool little angle over here it's like a little runway for i don't know a little mouse or something welcome to a six weeks update i'm very excited to show you this update can't believe what's taken off in six weeks are you ready all right i'm gonna open your eyes look at that this is the parent plant look at all these vines that are appearing from this plant this is so robust hang on let me find a better spot for it wow look at that new vine new vine hello it's like waving at us it is so beautiful i think i'm in love with this plant it was so boring it was just doing the three the three what he called stems growing upwards and just did nothing for a whole year and look at all this growth that are just happening here and this is trying to put a new teeny tiny little vine there's many many vines from here and i've seen them grow in a massive bush almost like a tree so this may become that someday but yeah i'm very excited for this but the cuttings are also very exciting i'm gonna quickly show you one last view of this before we move on to the cuttings all right so you want to quickly explain how i've been caring for the cuttings here they've been kind of living on the other side of this table where it gets a little bit of you see the head is poking through it gets a little bit of direct sunlight but mostly bright indirect light all day long so my gardener sometimes move it here under the shelf i don't know why he keeps doing that but when they do that see they're not getting any light yeah they will not do well so i maybe because it waters them and he just kind of puts it back randomly but yeah it needs to be all the way far out by the window uh just to get they can get better light do you see that all right so let's go from laughter this one is interesting so i do think that these guys do better with mid-section cuttings oh and i do water this lightly every two to three days or so i just watered it today so it's a little bit wet but i do let them dry out completely look at all this new side shoot these are all going to spread out this one's already had a head start this bottom one here so i can see why these guys are used heavily when people are grafting cacti because they do propagate easily they're very quick to grow this is only six weeks long and it can branch out very quickly and as you can see here usually when you cut the top here and you insert a cacti basically all the energy and food is going to be up to feed the cacti up above that's what grafting is for of course i'm not an expert at it not yet but i hope to explore it someday in this channel but really quickly again look at all these look at that don't that bring a smile to your face and this is probably a nice plant to give to people because it's so easy to care for it's one of the easier succulents to care for this one is quite spectacular this is a top cutting as you can as you can see the new flash here the new growth is lighter green in color and it's got many many leaves look at the thorns and the leaves this is a spectacular plant it is a survivor and it's put out two arms look at that it's too hello it's like two arms flailing in the air so this is doing really this is so marvelous i wasn't expecting it to branch out because this is the top cutting but it did so i'm really really grateful and this one here is looking gorgeous as well look at that form it's just so sculptural and i also like propagating these now because they're so random you cannot uh you cannot predict what they're gonna do this is another top cutting but this top cutting is not putting out secondary vines which is fine i guess this is how we normally would purchase them as a single uh branch like this and then that one is putting out three vines behind putting all of those survived i had zero deaths on these this is cute too it's put out a lot of tiny little branches and this little one that's trying to come off from the bottom oh man i don't know what i'm going to do with all these this is another top cutting it's doing beautifully but it's not giving me any vines which is fine again these are this is how you would normally purchase them as a single as a single branch here is another month and a half update actually through the plant out here it's getting direct sunlight and it's getting rained on almost every day as you can see the media is constantly wet but it's still surviving because i didn't have space up in that room to care for all these plants i have newer plants that needed rehabbing up there but it really really did find this is a species that's really really easy to care for look at how beautiful they look in a forest like this i have to let them go at some point because i am moving home and i have no space for them but that's insane i'm really loving this species and this is the mother plant that we cut from and this is why they are often used for grafting again you cut a triangle on top and you just mount a succulent or a cacti on top of it and graft it on that's something that i want to get into in the future but for now i'm still a succulent killer give me a few more years to correct my ways look at all these new arms that are just appearing so yeah this is why these guys are very very inexpensive they're very cheap they can tolerate a wide variety of condition this is living under another plant so it's not getting direct sunlight at all but it's doing really well it's getting bright in direct light and i've seen these grown in medium light as well so i really really recommend these for just like beginners or if you have like an office space or something where you want to see things constantly growing but you don't want to give them too much care you don't want to stress out too much this is the right plant for you all right enough i'm doing such crazy marketing on this plant they should pay me for it anyways i'm at botanist on instagram feel free to reach out if you have any questions regarding planned care and propagation i guess i will see you in the next episode look at all these arms this is crazy everybody is growing anyways i will see you in the next one bye bye for real now you

Channel: onlyplants

Views: 6,427

Keywords:

Id: IJo8zAr26Wc

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022